Monday, October 10, 2011

In the HBR article by Anand
Subramaniam, ‘Six Ways to Build Your Brand Through Customer Service’
highlights the manner in which companies seem to forget brand building, as an
exercise, at the customer service level. Building on this thought, he further
outlines steps which can be taken by companies and the next ten minutes of
reading shall, hopefully, take this thought to its fruition.

Expensive advertising, flashy brand ambassadors, thousands
of minutes of prime time television space and ‘shout at the top of your voices’
ambient campaigns seem to be the only way companies believe a brand can be
built. They cannot be blamed for this view as it as an approach that has worked
effectively but only in the short term. Companies do not realize that the only
significant outcome of the above measures is creating excitement and not necessarily
building the brand. So how about using ‘customer service’ as a game changer for
your brand building efforts?

To build your brand using customer service, aligning your
brand intent to a strategic intent becomes imperative. A company needs to look
at its overall strategic direction and brand related communications. From there
it should look at its available resources and develop a plan around its
existing customer service practices to ensure the brand spends more time
building itself in the customer service stage. To do this a company has to put certain
checklists in place.

-Companies need to ensure they can build brand aligned processes into the
various touch points accessible to the customer. This can start from a quick
response system to customer complaints to even human assisted customer service
over self service in case of high touch brands. Care of this magnitude will
always be rewarded with greater brand recognition and loyalty.

-Companies need to follow up the above measures
with brand aligned metrics that
allow them to judge success and work on improvements. Brands which are high touch
need to look beyond routine customer service metrics to numbers that can help
map service intent to the brand intent.

-Unifying knowledge bases and customer service
touch points can be another valuable step in aligning brand and service. By brand aligning your touch points a
company can ensure similar treatment of customers across channels which
guarantee the customer hearing the same brand message across channels.

The above measures mainly emphasize the need to align your
brand with all customer service related activities. By doing that a customer
can easily connect with the brand, instead of just connecting with the product,
which in the long run builds stronger brands with defined brand commitments and
not just flashy flirtations.